Blog

From the 12th to the 16th June, the member institutions of IIPC and researchers from a surprising array of backgrounds gathered at the Senate House in London for Web Archiving Week – an amalgamation of the Archives Unleashed hackathon, the annual IIPC conference, and the ReSAW Conference. The week’s activities conveyed a healthy and vibrant picture of current capture and curation practices as well as the use of archived web content for research.

They say culture trumps strategy every time so when we devised our Digital Preservation Strategy at the University of Melbourne we built it with culture as the first principle. Our university is fairly large (47,000 students, 6,500 staff and over 100 research centres/institutes) so identifying and preserving valuable digital materials has to be a distributed and cooperative effort, no individual department has the resources to take on the challenge single-handed. The Library already has significant digital collections of enduring value, and also the expertise to lead the preservation strategy, but we know that across the university teams and individuals are managing vast amounts of digital research data, university records and collections locally, and most have little or no support for curation or preservation. Our primary challenge has been how to foster this culture change so that our staff and students recognize both the value of digital materials and their inherent fragility, and take actions to preserve them.

The British Library is many things to many people. We are a place of research, a place of academic endeavour. We are a place of content, a dizzying array of content to marvel the minds and stimulate the senses. We are a place of exhibitions, of outreach, and of engagement. We are a place in the bustling heart of London, a place in the quiet countryside of Yorkshire, and a place online. We are a place of experts applying their expertise, of free Wi-Fi, and of reasonable coffee. We are a place of opportunity.

The DPC’s ‘big data siren’ went off again last month when no less an authority than The Economist proclaimed, ‘The World’s Most Valuable Commodity is no Longer Oil But Data’. Normally a mournful foghorn warning business away from things it cannot (or will not) understand, The Economist has been quite the advocate for the digital economy over the years. But whatever your view on the ‘big data bubble’ there is little doubt about the place data occupies in the long history of the economy: indeed Jack Goody, Michael Clanchy and others would have you believe that control over resources was the principal reason for the invention of literacy in the first place and thus indirectly of data too. You might well conclude that The Economist is sounding a millennia-old headline, ‘how can emergent forms of literacy expand new economic activities’.

DPC maintains a ‘big data siren’ because the commentariat, left or right, seem seldom to consider what data is and whether it’s sustainable. It’s a significant weakness. To the right: if we build an economy on data, are we not building on sand? To the left: can something as fragile as data really induce the end of capitalism? What happens if we place digital preservation into that narrative?

On the 14th June, DPASSH commences its second conference addressing the issues of digital preservation and the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities. I look forward to taking part and giving a paper on the application of some hard-earned best practice in digital preservation to social media research and heritage collections.

At the National Library of Scotland we were finding that some colour profiles in tif files were causing errors when we tried to convert them to JP2. So a couple of weeks ago I posted a question to the DPC-Discussion list asking members for their advice on JP2 files and colour profile support.

In the end we had some great help from Johan van der Knijff, from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) in the Netherlands, who has given me permission to use a distillation of our email exchange for the benefit of others who may run into the same problem (90% Johan – thanks Johan!) Here's a summary of our findings.

Last week was an exciting one for us, and action packed, I’ve only really had time to pause and reflect on our achievements now.

For those of you who missed it, the DPC was presented with the IRMS Innovation of the Year Award for the fantastic Digital Preservation Handbook!

Turning up for the awards, I was secretly hoping we’d win one of the three – yes three – awards we’d been nominated for, but didn’t expect it at all. Over our pre-dinner glass of fizz I even asked William in jest whether he had prepared ‘a few words’ – ha ha ha! But, having settled in for a fancy dinner and an evening’s entertainment, we were in fact back on our feet straight away to accept the first award!

The University Library at the University of Sheffield is taking the leading role in supporting the active management and curation of research data within the institution. We have recently implemented a research data catalogue and repository, ORDA (Online Research Data, powered by Figshare for institutions). We have also begun safeguarding library collections and key administrative assets of the University using ArchiveUs, the Sheffield brand of Rosetta, a digital preservation platform from Ex Libris. We are now working with figshare and Ex Libris to integrate both services to provide seamless preservation of published research data across the research lifecycle.

For those of us acquiring (or discovering) piles of floppy disks among our collections, the KryoFlux might just be a solution to our problems. Unlike modern USB floppy disk drives, this little floppy disk controller card can read and capture raw disk images of data stored using numerous disk encoding formats, including some that are especially early or unusual. What’s more, it handles media suffering from degradation or bitrot more effectively than most alternatives. Given these advantages, it’s not surprising that the KryoFlux is increasingly finding their way into archives and cultural heritage institutions.